After more than a century in which setting constitutional limits
on political power has dominated the field of democratic theory,
active citizenship has resurfaced as a legitimate topic of
theoretical reflection.(1) Before
this, one would have to go back to Rousseau and Hegel to find major
political theorists who placed citizenship at the center of their
work.

Today's debate over the contours of
democratic citizenship is dominated by three perspectives. Liberal
political philosophers, led by John Rawls, have argued that the
duties and virtues of citizenship should be derived from prior
institutional principles of justice. A good citizen is someone who
possesses the virtues needed to act according to these principles and
feel at home in a society whose institutions are ordered by them.
Republican and communitarian critics of this liberal view such as
J.G.A. Pocock, Michael Sandel and Alasdair MacIntyre object that this
is not enough to ensure stability or justice. In addition to the
liberal virtues of tolerance and a commitment to play the role of the
loyal opposition, citizens also must be committed to certain
substantive ideals. For the more historically-minded republicans,
these are universal ideals of excellence and public service. For
communitarians, they are the specific moral or religious ideals of
particular communities within the larger liberal tradition.

I want to step outside this
intramural debate in order to focus more directly on the democratic
content of citizenship. What skills, habits, and dispositions do
citizens need to generate political power democratically and to share
in democratic public life? I call the conception of political virtue
that I favor Emersonian. "Let us be poised, and wise, and our own
today," Emerson urged, "amidst this vertigo of shows and
politics."(2) It is this notion of "poise" while handling
political power that gives Emerson's reflections on the virtues of
the democratic citizen their distinct value.

Why burden democratic citizenship
with Emerson?

While Oliver Wendell Holmes's 1884
characterization of Emerson as a poetic idealist who "accepted his
martyrdom with meek submission"(3) probably has been beaten back for the last
time, there is still no scholarly consensus on Emerson's status as a
political theorist. Some of his defenders, such as Len Gougeon,
emphasize his opposition to slavery(4) or, as Christina Zwarg does, his friendship
with Margaret Fuller(5) as signs of his political egalitarianism.
Others, such as George Kateb and Stanley Cavell, emphasize his
commitment to the values of individuality and
autonomy,(6) choosing to place Emerson among liberal
moralists rather than political theorists. A third, more critical set
of commentators, for example, David Leverenz and Christopher
Newfield, has found Emerson all too ready to defer to patriarchal and
corporate forms of authority rather than elaborate his own theory of
popular political participation.(7)

Given these competing
interpretations, it would be surprising to find that Emerson had a
coherent democratic theory. He did not, and there are several reasons
why. Emerson's political views were not entirely consistent and his
feelings toward active political engagement were ambivalent. Instead
of exploring these contradictions and trying to reconcile them,
however, Emerson tended to rely on the idea of Nature as an
independent synthesizing force of its own. We will see how this
affected his understanding of power in the next section and his
ability to formulate an egalitarian conception of democratic
citizenship.

Despite these shortcomings, however,
Emerson remains a valuable resource for democratic theory because he
insisted on the importance of generating, not just constitutionally
limiting, political power in a democratic society. Emersonian
citizens, I will argue, possess an appreciation of the strengths of
character needed to sustain this dual process through hard
times.

Emerson himself did not always
display this kind of democratic character. Sometimes, especially in
his journals, he wrote as if democratic citizenship was a painful
chore and public figures personally abhorrent.(8) My point is that even though Emerson did not
formulate a full democratic theory and did not always relish
democratic politics, this does not mean that an Emersonian theory of
democratic citizenship, with the help of others such as Dewey and
Royce, cannot be constructed. In this essay I identify three elements
in Emerson's work - power, poise, and place - that a theory of
democratic citizenship can make good use of and that cannot be found
in contemporary republican and communitarian writings.

1. Power

As Michael Lopez has noted, "The
search after power, the goal of empowerment, remains consistent
through Emerson's essays" even though the forms that power takes vary
considerably.(9) This is true of his understanding of
political power as well. It comes in many forms and can be transmuted
in several ways. Before examining Emerson's attempts to come to terms
with the dynamism and fluidity of political power and its
relationship to other forms of power in Nature, we must, as Lopez
does, take special notice of the positive valence that Emerson places
on power in all its forms. To understand Emerson's interpretation of
political power, it is necessary to start with the hold that all
power has on us: "And what activity the desire of power inspires!
What toils it sustains! How it sharpens the perceptions and stores
the memory with facts."(10)

Unlike democratic theorists today,
Emerson underscored the creative and inventive role that the desire
for power plays in democratic politics. He was certainly aware of its
dangers in The Conduct of
Life ("This power, to be
sure, is not clothed in satin."(11)), but he believed that without this desire
for power there was no predicting and influencing the future a
constructive way. "The same energy in the Greek Demos
drew the remark, that the evils of popular government appear greater
than they are; there is compensation for them in the spirit and
energy it awakens."(12)

It is this desire that Emerson wants
to use to mine unequally distributed intellectual and economic
resources in the service of a more inclusive democracy. However, to
get to this point, Emerson had to struggle with the notion of natural
inequalities. The results were not entirely successful.

Journal entries in late 1822 mark out
a position against natural equality that Emerson tried to come to
terms with long into his adult life.

I believe that nobody now
regards the maxim 'that all men are born equal,' as any thing more
than a convenient hypothesis or an extravagant declamation. For the
reverse is true -- that all men are born unequal in personal powers
and in those essential circumstance, of time, parentage, country,
fortune. The least knowledge of the natural history of man adds
another important particular to these; namely, what class of men he
belongs to -- European, Moor, Tartar, African? Because Nature has
plainly assigned different degrees of intellect to these different
races, and the barriers between are insurmountable.(13)

Emerson did struggle with this view,
sometimes mightily.(14) In English Traits he held that "Race in the negro is of
appalling importance"(15) even though at an Abolitionist rally in 1845
he had doubted their "hopeless inferiority" in light of the "facts
collected in the United States and in the West
Indies."(16) In private the long journal entry quoted
above was repeatedly qualified. "Slavery," he wrote, "is an
institution for converting men into monkeys."(17)

The more Emerson felt that racial
inequalities were the product of institutions like slavery, the more
active he became in the abolitionist movement.(18) However, his faith in Nature kept him from
abandoning his earlier views entirely, despite "the impossibility of
arriving at satisfaction on the historical question of
race."(19)

Differences between rich and poor
gave rise to another ambivalence. In "Self-reliance" he wrote that
the "mob" that "goes abroad to beg a cup of water of the urns of
other men" repelled him.(20) Jacksonian democracy was "nonsense" propped
up by "public opinion."(21) "The mass," he claimed in The Conduct of Life, "are animal, in pupilage, and near
chimpanzee,"(22) and Emerson was quick to justify their
economic misfortunes according to a simplistic doctrine of natural
economic growth.(23) However, he was unable to leave it at that.
Alongside the famous passage from "Self-Reliance" in which he
grudgingly gives up his "wicked dollar" to the poor "through
miscellaneous popular charities,"(24) we find seemingly contradictory sentiments
like this passage from his 1841 lecture, "Man the Reformer."

...The state must
consider the poor man, and all voices must speak for him. Every child
that is born must have a just chance for his bread. Let the
amelioration in our laws of property proceed from the concession of
the rich, not from the grasping of the poor. Let us begin by habitual
imparting. Let us understand that the equitable rule is, that no one
should take more than his share, let him be ever so
rich.(25)

On the equality of men and women,
Emerson was again of two minds. Despite his admiration for Margaret
Fuller and the influence of his second wife Lydian, Emerson was
unwilling to abandon the idea of woman's angelic nature. "Woman only
can tell the heights of feminine nature, & the only way in which
man can help her, is by observing woman reverentially & whenever
she speaks from herself & catches him in inspired moments up to a
heaven of honor & religion, to hold her to that point by
reverential recognition of the divinity that speaks through
her."(26) However, no sooner had he written this, than
he slipped back into the negative stereotype of the obtrusive
housewife: "In every woman's conversation & total influence mild
or acid lurks the conventional devil."(27)

At once a divine inspiration and the
carping voice of social conformity, woman in Emerson's eyes falls
short. As Jeffrey Steele says, "Man the Reformer" reveals Emerson's
preference for a powerful masculine spirit over woman, the "puny,
protected person guarded by walls and curtains, stoves and down beds,
coaches, and men-servants and women-servants from the earth and the
sky."(28) Even though Emerson believed that the Women's
Movement and the Antislavery Movement were equally deserving of his
support in the mid-1850s, he also believed that women did not want an
equal role in public affairs at that time.(29)

Is there an Emersonian conception of
equality? We could, of course, settle for something like the equal
potential for self-reliance -- that "unattained yet attainable self"
Emerson suggests all individuals can and should strive for. There is
something of the poet and the hero in all of us he argued in
Essays: First
Series.(30) Even the masses, he claimed in
"Considerations by the Way," if they can be decomposed, have this
potential: "To say then, the majority are wicked, means no malice, no
bad heart in the observer, but, simply that the majority are unripe,
and have not yet come to themselves, do not yet know their
opinion."(31) If we choose this conception of Emersonian
equality,(32) then we are likely to set aside Emerson's
particular views of natural racial, economic, and gender inequalities
as unworthy of him.

One alternative to this reading of
Emerson is that his blindspots and inconsistencies represent a bias
in the underlying concept of the "attainable self." Exactly what is
to be attained through self-reliant thought and action? Self-reliance
is not a universal value but rather a cultural value that is specific
to early nineteenth-century patriarchal, commercializing society.
Even if Emerson was unhappy with the emerging mass
society,(33) he still resisted experiments that called
into question possessive individualism, in particular socialist
experiments and a more fluid, feminist conception of
identity.(34) The underlying concept of equality that his
more specific conception of an equal potential for self-reliance
rests upon is, on this reading, deeply flawed.

There may be a kernel or two of truth
in these readings of Emerson. He sometimes did think of self-reliance
as a Kantian ideal that all rational persons were capable of striving
for, especially in thought. Regardless of where they started, they
could do a better job thinking for themselves. They could improve
their Nature, even if they could never achieve equality of results.
At other times, he seemed simply to refuse to take feminist and
socialist values seriously, hiding his cultural biases behind the
concept of Nature.

However, I am suggesting another way
to read Emerson's appeal to Nature that emphasizes its place within
his democratic theory of power. In this sense Nature represents the
external reality of raw materials and uncultivated ground to which
individuals stand in creative antagonism, and also the products that
people create out of these natural sources as well as their own
capacities, skills, and dispositions that they bring to this
relationship with Nature.(35) Nature, then, provides a variety of
resources, including our own abilities, out of which power can emerge
and be shaped. When tapped in this way, Nature generates additional
sources of power that will follow certain "laws," and when power is
used in accordance with these laws by people with the "desire for
power," the possibility of generating political power and a more
inclusive political domain exists. The process of generating
political power from Nature and other intellectual and economic
resources is not a simple progression, but it does follow certain
patterns, and these are what Emerson calls laws of power.

Emerson's laws of power do not
predict with certainty. They connect the cooperative generation of
political power to other natural and human resources through the
medium of human character. This is not an esoteric secret. Even
ordinary citizens can see how intellectual and economic power works
its way through densely knotted limbs, succeeds itself along new
circular lines, and never swings too far in one direction before
moving back in the other. Once they have grasped these laws of power
and seen how power depends in part on human character, Emerson
believed, they will be in a position to generate greater political
power and a more inclusive political domain.

This ability to grasp the laws of
power is itself rooted in Nature, but it is not merely a matter of
drill and sheer concentration(36) anymore than it is a radiant quality of
individual greatness that enables citizens to make use of
intellectual and economic resources. The more citizens honestly
discuss their own shortcomings and personal stakes, the more capable
they will be to grasp the laws of power, tap into intellectual and
economic resources, and finally expand the political domain within
the shifting boundaries of these laws.

In the essays "Compensation" and
"Circles" Emerson describes these patterns or laws of
power.(37) In the former essay he claims that "each
thing is a half, and suggests another thing to make it whole." This
built-in "polarity" can be traced back to human nature. It is not
just that human beings are made up of contradictory traits, but that
actions and compensatory reactions originate in our orientations
toward ourselves and others. When we have done someone an injustice,
for example, we speak fearfully, and the fear that we will be called
to account soon makes us hated for what we did. We condemn ourselves
in our own words -- not explicitly, but in our tone and phrasing.
Only when we are aware of the fact that our own powerful acts produce
a true image of our own worth, can we speak more plainly and
honestly. Power's compensatory swings begin with our own fearfulness,
and by grasping its psychological origins we are in a better position
to control it.(38)

In "Circles" Emerson then extends
this analysis of power along a second axis. In opposition to the law
of polarity is the law of "swift circumscription." Every action has a
tendency to be superceded by a greater action; every object is
impermanent. Again, what drives this process is something deeply
rooted in human character. "We thirst for approbation, yet cannot
forgive the approver. The sweet of nature is love; yet if I have a
friend I am tormented by my imperfections." As the circles of our
friends are redrawn so that we do not have to confront the fearsome
thought that old friends might see through us, we rationalize our
actions by underlining the others' shortcomings. An even wider circle
is then needed to avoid our imagined deficiencies, and we soon forget
that it was our own deficiency, our own fear of disapproval, that
forced us outward in the first place.

There is no way out of this process
of "swift circumscription" and no way to avoid power's "polarity."
When Emerson says that "Life is a search after power," however, he
doesn't mean, as Hobbes did, that we are at the mercy of these
natural laws. On the contrary, by grasping how power naturally works,
we can better adjust our "efforts to obstacles."

All power is of one kind,
a sharing of the nature of the world. The mind that is parallel with
the laws of nature will be in the current of events, and strong with
their strength.(39)

According to Emerson, Nature is a
rich source of material to be used by creative human powers and at
the same time a harsh, determining force in our lives: "...all kinds
of power usually emerge at the same time; good energy, and bad; power
of mind, with physical health; the ecstasies of devotion, with the
exasperations of debauchery."(40) Nature's magazine of powers, good and bad,
are there to be used. Properly used when Nature resists our efforts,
these powers take us deeper into, not beyond, our ordinary
experience.

In one sense, then, Emerson was a
determinist but not a fatalist. "Thus we trace Fate, in matter, mind,
and morals, -- in race, in retardations of strata, and in thought and
character as well....If Fate follows and limits power, power attends
and antagonizes Fate."(41) Necessity hoops us in, but our capacity to
tap into natural forms of power makes freedom possible. What powers
are at our disposal and how are we to use them to counter our fate
within the laws of polarity and circumscription?

Emerson often praised cat-like
dexterity and plain hard work. In these acts he claimed to find "the
miraculous in the common."(42) Human beings are equally capable, he argued,
of making useful products if not equally pleasing poetry. Consistent
with this, Emerson was quick to find fault with those who accumulated
wealth and power parasitically and did not, Locke would say, leave
enough for others to use productively.

Every man is a consumer,
and ought to be a producer. He fails to make his place good in the
world, unless he not only pays his debt, but also adds something to
the common wealth.(43)

When unequal private wealth does not
contribute to the "common wealth" in this material sense, it is
unnatural.

What troubles Emerson so much about
giving a "wicked dollar" to charity is that it represents a kind of
political alienation for the giver, not so much dependency for the
receiver. If you have the money, it is much easier to pay someone
else to take care of the anonymous poor than it is to understand
their lives yourself. But when intellectual and economic powers are
used in cooperation productively, the process can be of value to rich
and poor alike.(44) What it takes to do this is not a selfless
commitment to philanthropy or utopian socialism, Emerson believed,
but a certain kind of poised, cooperative effort.

Can the poor afford to wait for this
direct relationship with their benefactors? Is it really their
responsibility to help others overcome their political alienation?
What guarantee do they have that once the rich and poor alike have
understood Emerson's laws of Nature, they will be better off
economically or politically? Emerson does not take up this line of
questioning. Instead, he asks another question that he thinks is
prior to these. What kind of character will be needed by all
democratic citizens if they are ever going to be ready to take up
these matters? Without it, no statute or constitutional provision can
protect the weak from economic exploitation and political
disenfranchisement.

2. Poise

"Experience" was written in 1844 when
Emerson was coming to terms with the death of his son and the need to
take a stronger public stand against slavery. It was a time when
poise was more than a matter of political etiquette for him.

For Emerson poise became that
peculiar political virtue that enables citizens to handle themselves
and the things they have formed out of Nature when they do not have
the luxury of starting from scratch. Democratic politics is precisely
the kind of experience Emerson describes when he says that we find
ourselves in mid-stride on a staircase and with no clear memory of
how we came to be there. This is the feeling democratic citizens
continually experience as they are forced to change the rules of the
game on themselves in order to cope with unforeseen circumstances and
ironic twists of fate.

The distinctive feature of Emersonian
poise is the way that it enables citizen to responds to this fearsome
challenge. Poise is an orientation toward power - "the vertigo of
shows and politics" - that enables citizens to express their desire
for power creatively and cooperatively without losing sight of the
subtle ways in which this peculiar desire also clouds their vision
and makes them tone deaf to the dynamics of power in a democratic
society. Emersonian poise enables democratic citizens to engage in
the pervasive power struggles that run through democratic politics,
sometimes openly and other times covertly, without losing their
balance or their ear for the sound of the "switch" in their own
voices.(45) "There is a sort of climate in every man's
speech," Emerson wrote in his journal, "running from hot noon, when
words flow like steam & perfume -- to cold night, when they are
frozen."(46) Poised democratic citizens must be able to
register the entire range.

Just as philosophical inquiry depends
upon the Socratic virtues of honesty and a willingness to submit
one's own arguments to critical scrutiny, so democratic political
dialogue depends upon this Emersonian virtue of poise. Its
correlative vices are, on one side, a communitarian self-absorption
with identity politics and, on the other, a liberal impatience with
the process of political dialogue. The former blinds citizens to the
operations of power that maintain the boundaries of their community;
the latter encourage citizens to assume that silent acquiescence
always means assent.

Political virtue, according to
republicans and communitarians, is the ability and disposition of
citizens to overcome self-interest for some greater political good.
They disagree about what the greater political good is and how an
attachment to it can be created. They share, unwittingly, a naive
attitude toward power. In this section I will be concerned with
republican views and how they differ from the orientation toward
power embodied by Emersonian poise. In the next section I will take
up the communitarian position.

Republicans argue that political
participation has an intrinsic value that is greater than the value
of other competing goods.(47) That intrinsic value may be an individual
agonistic one: competing for political recognition in itself is more
exciting and challenging than the pursuit of private wealth or
theoretical knowledge. Another possibility is that political
participation is valued more highly because it is the most gratifying
form of collective activity. Discussing and addressing public issues
together has an intrinsic value higher than participating in family
or economic activities.

To realize the intrinsic values of
political participation, other interests have to be limited. That is,
republican citizens have to have the skills to participate in
politics, and they have to be disposed to use these skills even at
the expense of their economic and social interests. These abilities
and dispositions that constitute republican political virtue can be
nurtured gradually through participation in voluntary associations
or, if need be, ingrained through an austere military regimen. In
either case, the rhetorical and deliberative republican skills of
political engagement and the attachments to honor, glory, and
political debate do not come naturally. Furthermore, they are not
skills and dispositions that all can or should aspire to. Republican
citizenship, since Machiavelli, is active but not egalitarian.

Unlike republican political virtue,
Emersonian poise does not rank political participation above other
human activities or reserve it for a chosen few. Emerson himself
never romanticized politics. On the contrary, he believed that "Every
actual state is corrupt" and legislation an "after-work, a poor
patching" that is better repealed than left
standing.(48) At the same time he was able to recognize and
respond to urgent political demands. Witness his reaction to the
Fugitive Slave Law and Webster's defense of it.

These things show that no
forms, neither constitutions, nor laws, nor covenants, nor churches,
nor bibles, are of any use in themselves. The Devil nestles
comfortably into them all. There is no help but in the head and heart
and hamstrings of a man. Covenants are of no use without honest men
to keep them; laws of none but with loyal citizens to obey
them.(49)

Emerson does not categorically reject
laws and political institutions, but he forcefully underscores their
limits as adequate instruments for solving deep social conflicts.
This ambivalence towards politics in Emerson results from his
understanding that power takes shape in the hands of democratic
citizens and that they can neither do without it nor give themselves
over to it entirely.(50)

For example, to face the poor and do
one's share with one's own hands takes more poise in the Emersonian
sense than to pay someone else to do the work. It takes poise to join
with the poor, without sermonizing, and understand how the dominant
forms of power oppressing them can be harnessed constructively. Thus,
poise is not a political virtue in the sense that republican civic
virtue is; it is not a capacity to resist economic and social
interests for the sake of political participation. Poise is a way of
getting closer to the effects of power in order to see the potential
for using it constructively as well as understand its debilitating
statist tendencies. To repeat, Emerson does not reject philanthropic
institutions categorically, and Emersonian poise does not require
that we reject state-run welfare programs in a mass democratic
society. What poise involves is firsthand experience with the
institutions designed to help the poor so that these problems can be
addressed more knowledgeably as they arise. This holds for donors and
taxpayers as well as administrators and bureaucrats; they cannot hope
to understand the way power operates through these institutions and
within the economy more broadly without encountering those they want
to help where they want to help them.(51)

Furthermore, to be effective, this
act of composing oneself to come to grips with power cannot be done
alone.(52) Emerson's treatment of "representative men"
illustrates how poise should work as a form of collective resistance
against the beguiling images of powerful experts and leaders.

Even the most-admired public figures
are flawed, Emerson argued, and we should not think of them as role
models. "Bonaparte," for example, "was the idol of common men because
he had in transcendent degree the qualities and powers of common
men." At the same time, "this exorbitant egotist narrowed,
impoverished, and absorbed the power and existence of those who
served him."(53) The Emersonian model of poised resistance to
this idolatry is the

...sturdy lad from New
Hampshire or Vermont, who in turn tries all the professions, who
teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits a
newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in
successive years, always like a cat falls on his
feet...(54)

This is no recluse. His "professions"
put him in touch with Nature, but also require that he master the art
of conversation. He knows how to buy and sell, how to engage the
reading public, how to hear as well as speak with his congregation,
and finally how to represent them in debate on the floor of Congress.
Emerson wants citizens to recognize the complexity of power through a
wide range of on-site conversations.

When each new speaker
strikes a new light, emancipates us from the oppression of the last
speaker to oppress us with the greatness and exclusiveness of his own
thought, and then yields us to another redeemer, we seem to recover
our rights, to become men.(55)

Because "Our conversation with Nature
is not just what it seems,"(56) we must be willing and able to engage with
"each new speaker." In an age of specialized knowledge democratic
citizens should avoid condescending to those they think know less
than they do and uncritically deferring to experts. How can ordinary
citizens contest expert knowledge and also avoid the arrogance that
their own professions sometimes breed? Emerson's solution is not
mysterious. Only someone who has conversed with farmers, with
congregants, with students, and with legislators on an equal footing
and in their own terms is going to have this kind of poise. To hold
our own ground, we must be "a bundle of relations, a knot of
roots."(57) Self-reliant citizens should depend upon
others in this sense. They need sources of encouragement but also
honest sounding boards that enable them to hear how they sound to
others.

Taken literally, of course, Emerson's
longing for "sturdy" citizens who can switch jobs was increasingly
obsolete when he wrote and is now only relevant for laid-off workers
who are bounced from one entry level job to another.(58) What is still useful in Emerson's vision of
this catlike figure is the notion that he, unlike Napoleon,
represents the dialogical skills that democratic citizens need to
engage others whose experience differs dramatically from theirs. You
do not have to be a farmer, merchant, teacher, or elected politician
to converse with these people. What you have to be is someone ready
to listen carefully to what they have to offer and listen hard for
the sounds of condescension in your own voice as you question
them.

Sometimes this will be easier than
others. For example, when you depend directly on the voluntary
cooperation of another to satisfy your own interests; you can't just
go your separate ways without giving something up that is important
to you. But Emersonian poise also pertains to situations where it is
not immediately clear that people share each other's fate. Where the
issues are national or international in scope, then it is not at all
clear that Emerson's talkative "lad" could persuade those who are not
his neighbors that they are all in it together. Can poise really do
us much good where the parties are not already on speaking terms and
committed to a common enterprise such as teachers, school board
members, and parents faced with the need to raise money for
educational programs in the same school district?

3. Place

Emersonian political virtue begins
locally in a geographical and in a psychological sense. A poised
citizen is someone capable of picking up on local accents and customs
different from her own that can either obstruct or facilitate more
cosmopolitan ends. In this respect Emersonian poise differs radically
from contemporary communitarianism which sheers off the jagged edges
of actual political experience. The localness of Emersonian political
virtue, then, is not a matter of being faithful to the ethical norms
of a small community. It refers to a way of taking in and being
engaged with the political world, what John Dewey would call
"experiencing"(59) political power, starting with the first
circle of relations that surround us and gradually moving out from
there.

To make the contemporary relevance of
local Emersonian poise clearer, however, we have to extend Emerson in
directions later mapped out by Dewey and Josiah Royce.

In late January 1841, Emerson
delivered the lecture, "Man, the Reformer," his response to the
"challenge of George Ripley's Brook Farm commune and to Orestes
Brownson's critique of transcendentalism."(60) According to David Jacobson, in this lecture
Emerson argued that "...the site of politics is local" and "...he
consistently advised his readers to attend to the issues of their own
community before going far and wide in search of political
causes."(61) Unlike these nineteenth-century
communitarians, Emerson's localism was not hostile to either larger
political causes or national political institutions. Consider, for
example, Emerson's encounter with the Fugitive Slave Law. He begins
his March 7, 1854 address regretfully acknowledging in an aside that
he had never really witnessed slavery and qualifying his own
authority to speak on this subject as an expert. "The one thing not
to be forgiven to intellectual persons is not to know their own task,
or to take their ideas from others and believe in the ideas of
others. From this want of manly rest in their own, and foolish
acceptance of other people's watchwords, comes the imbecility and
fatigue of their conversation. For they cannot affirm these from any
original experience..."(62)

Just as Emersonian poise is a
prerequisite but not a substitute for effective institutional
solutions to poverty and oppression, so too is local engagement a
prerequisite but not a substitute for an understanding of and
involvement in national issues. National politics can be heady, and
to avoid being either enchanted or repelled by power on such a large
scale, Emersonian poise must be developed locally first.

John Dewey recognized this
relationship between citizenship and place: "Unless local communal
life can be restored, the public cannot adequately resolve its most
urgent problem, to find and identify itself." Dewey ended this
passage on what it means for citizens to find themselves as a body
politic by invoking Emerson.

We lie, as Emerson said,
in the lap of an immense intelligence. But that intelligence is
dormant and its communications are broken, inarticulate and faint
until it possesses the local community as its
medium.(63)

Local participation does not simply
educate the public by giving it access to more fine-grained
information. Local participation is the "medium" out of which a
coherent public identity grows because it is here that citizens learn
how to ask each other political questions about who they are and what
forms of power they value. Without these questions, access to more
information is meaningless.(64) Without this locally educated "immense
intelligence," frustration will quickly set in, strategic openings
will be exploited too forcefully, tempers will flare, and quieter
voices will be ignored. Emerson's language in the passage Dewey
refers to is less explicit than Dewey's - he prefers the images of
climatic and alluvial change to direct discussion. But "society" is
still for him a "troop of thinkers" and what attracts "capital or
genius or labor" is "a city like New York, or
Constantinople."(65)

The local character of political
virtue is also captured by Josiah Royce's concept of provincialism.
The "new and wiser provincialism" that Royce advocated was, he
claimed, "no mere renewal of the old sectionalism." Rather than
dividing people, provincialism "makes people want to idealize, to
adorn, to ennoble, to educate, their own province."(66) Then it can work as an antidote to three
political problems, and in this way provincialism directly engages
power.

First, argued Royce, by giving
citizens objective reasons for taking pride in their local
institutions, provincialism enables them to give strangers a share in
this common wealth. Royce calls this assimilation, but it is not
assimilation in the homogenizing and self-denying way we tend to
think of it today. By becoming more loyal to their local democratic
institutions -- the libraries, the public parks, and the schools as
well as the elective offices -- citizens become more capable of
"assimilating to our own social order the strangers that are within
our gates."(67) Provincialism enables citizens to convince
strangers already in their midst that the demands of local democratic
citizenship are worth it. Provincialism gives citizens the
wherewithal to persuade others to become fellow-citizens when they
could remain resident aliens. It is the poise citizens need to resist
the temptation either to exclude or denigrate the other.

The second danger that provincialism
wards off is what Royce called "leveling" or social conformity.
Provincialism, he believed, helps citizens identify this destructive
form of power and counteract it through the pride they have in the
local cultural institutions they have built.(68) Similarly, provincialism can counteract the
"greatest danger of popular government," that is, the "spirit of the
mob."(69) Cautiously relying on the work of Le Bon,
Royce suggested that the mob psychology that can undermine order in
democratic society can be avoided by pride in the value of one's
local political institutions. Unlike assimilation where provincialism
generates a new form of creative power, in the cases of leveling and
mob psychology, provincialism serves as an antidote to destructive
forms of power. In these two cases provincialism represents the poise
not to be carried along with the crowd -- that is, not to conform to
its pedestrian or violent ways.

The local nature of poise that allows
citizens to take advantage of their latent "immense intelligence" can
be distinguished from the communitarian virtues that philosophers
such as Alasdair MacIntyre have called attention to. For
communitarians, roughly speaking, individual identity and the
effective pursuit of individual conceptions of the good depend upon
membership in a community that has more in common than simply a set
of liberal procedures for solving problems of distributive justice.
Without the support of a substantive moral or religious community a
person cannot sustain coherent individual life plans and support
schemes for redistribution.(70) Conversely, political virtue in these
substantive communities should enable citizens to support the basic
structure of the community not just for its own sake but also for the
sake of their own individual projects and identities.

Unlike civic republicans,
communitarians do not value political participation as the highest
form of human activity. They value political order because without it
their deeper, shared moral commitments and their individual
conceptions of the good would be unrealizable. What communitarians
and republicans share is a conception of political virtue that is
inattentive to the peculiar dynamics of power. Republicans glorify
the exercise of power, whereas communitarians romantically yearn for
a community in which the power to include will never have to be used
to exclude. The latter's vision of a harmonious political community
or a set of harmoniously interconnected communities myopically
overlooks the way that forming and sustaining even the most
law-abiding communities always involve violence or the threat of
violence against those, inside and out, who do not share the
community's moral commitments.(71)

How exactly does poised participation
in local politics cultivate a more critical orientation toward power?
As I have already suggested, awakening democracy's "immense
intelligence" is a matter of teaching citizens how to ask the right
questions. The city neighborhood famously described by Jane Jacobs
suggests one possibility. Children growing up within this environment
learned how neighbors who were also strangers took care of,
interrogated, and disagreed with one another civilly without any
professional duty bearing down on them. More generally, Christopher
Lasch has suggested, neighbors learn how to ask questions of one
another, make arguments, and agree to revisit their disagreements.
This "quasi-public forum" and other neighborhood meeting grounds do
not constitute voluntary associations in the Tocquevillian sense
because they do not exist to serve a single purpose. They have the
more diffuse end of encouraging the political virtue of "decency" in
conversation.(72)

Lasch has been fairly criticized for
idealizing these local institutions and the folks who frequent them.
Simply coming out in favor of decent conversation is hardly enough,
given the mixed record of the populist movements Lasch aligns himself
with.(73) But the political virtue of Emersonian poise
does not require this kind of idealization of "provincial" life. To
cope with the alluring and frightening complexities of power on a
larger scale, democratic citizens need an education in power that
makes sense of their immediate world. There is no guarantee that they
will gain this poise and their "immense intelligence" awakened by
confronting the political conflicts that run through their own
backyards. Sometimes the locals get it wrong and the elites Lasch
excoriates for abandoning faith in them do step in just in time. I am
only suggesting that without this experience the dangers Royce
describes (widespread nativism, conformity, and demagoguery) are more
likely to get the better of both. The elites Lasch presumptively
criticizes are more likely to be of help when they also have had a
share in creating and maintaining the local institutions Royce
praises. For example, simply holding public hearings on new
administrative regulations without having had some experience trying
to make local institutions work may only polarize the local community
and encourage violent local opposition.(74)

5. Conclusion

More still remains to be done if
Emerson's treatment of power, poise, and place are to form the basis
of a theory of democratic citizenship. Staying focused on local
politics becomes harder as the news media trivialize local concerns
and transform national politics into entertainment. Spotting the
faraway local forces that drive seemingly abstract conflicts requires
that citizens can understand thick descriptions of these conflicts
when they are given to them by people on the ground over there.
However, only their own local political experience can prepare
democratic citizens to understand these descriptions and critically
discuss issues such as the war in Bosnia or the North Atlantic Free
Trade Agreement that will have effects on many of them sooner or
later. Otherwise, they can only repeat the platitudes and cliches
that pass for a national debate, as reports from the front sail by
them.

Democratic citizens should be able to
discuss the generation as well as the constitution of power without
denigrating their opponents as power grabbers and deluding themselves
that they are somehow above power politics. This kind of civility and
self-awareness depends upon a degree of humility that can be learned.
Democratic citizens are educated, not born; and their education is an
education in the protean ways power courses through their own
lives.

It is also an education that begins
on familiar ground. Democratic citizenship doesn't stop here, but it
must start here. Only on this local terrain do citizens have a chance
to experience the compensatory and circular patterns of power and
learn that through these convoluted patterns they do often depend
upon the willing cooperation of those they disagree with on seemingly
more abstract issues. It is this kind of experience that will give
them the imagination to see how larger circles of power are bound
together.

Finally, democratic citizens must be
capable of discussing differences in power and morality, and this
includes listening to how they sound to each other in the heat of
these conversations. Everyone does not have to speak in the same
stripped down vernacular. It is hard to imagine what such a political
esperanto would sound like. Instead, they should strive to listen for
the accents in their own voices that they had not been aware of
before and that their opponents often had good reason to
notice.

Emerson's skills as an orator have
long been appreciated.(75) It is not clear what kind of listener he was.
If his journal entries are any indication, he spent a lot of time
talking silently to himself when in the company of those he found
fault with, and rehashing this silent conversation in his mind later.
The skills and attitudes of a democratic citizen are much different.
Such a person is not just poised and anxious to hold forth on great
public issues, and prepared, in words Emerson used to describe
Montaigne, "to shoot the gulf."(76) The democratic citizen I have in mind is
attentive to the way power echoes in his or her own voice and can be
used to forge political connections with others, however tenuous and
temporary.

Emerson sometimes reached out in this
way in letters, statements of public support, and even monetary
contributions. That he also often found this psychologically hard to
do does not diminish the importance of this kind of political virtue
for democrats today. It reminds us just how demanding democratic
citizenship can be. Again from "Experience":

Never mind the ridicule,
never mind the defeat; up again, old heart! -- it seems to say, --
there is victory yet for all justice; and the true romance which the
world exists to realize will be the transformation of genius into
practical power.(77)

In Richardson's words, this is an
essay about "the impossibilities, miscarriages, and mortgagings of
power," but it is not a "defeated essay." While "the fire within may
be modest," it may still be "sufficient" to illuminate the complex
centrality of power in democratic politics.(78)

5. 5.Christina
Zwarg, Feminist Conversations:
Fuller, Emerson, and the Play of Reading (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995). Cf.
Jeffrey Steele, The
Representation of the Self in the American
Renaissance (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1987).

6. 6.This line of
interpretation, arguably the most popular today, began with Stephen
E. Whicher, Freedom and Fate:
An Inner Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1953). See especially, George Kateb, Emerson and Self-Reliance (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1995)
and Stanley Cavell, Conditions
Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian
Perfectionism (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1990).

7. 7.David
Leverenz, Manhood and the
American Renaissance (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1989) and Christopher Newfield,
The Emerson Effect:
Individualism and Submission in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1996).

8. 8. "Even when
Emerson engaged in political struggle with characteristic passion,
his journals and letters reveal the distrust tinged with irritation
that forms of collective action continued to evoke in him even when
they seemed clearly necessary." Maurice Gonnaud, An Uneasy Solitude: Individual and Society in
the Work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, trans. Lawrence Rosenwald (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1987), p.408. I am indebted to Greg
Garvey for reminding me of this contradiction in Emerson's
life.

14. 14. Even
though he wrote to President Van Buren in April 1838 protesting the
relocation of the Cherokee, "Like many other moralists and reformers,
he was not yet convinced that blacks and other minorities were
altogether equal in their ability to compete in society. If they were
not self-reliant, any effort to establish their social equality
through external agitation and moral suasion would be for naught.
This thorny question would plague him for some years." Ralph Waldo
Emerson, Emerson's Antislavery
Writings, eds. Len Gougeon
and Joel Myerson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995),
p.xix.

15. 15. "Race" in
English Traits, Es
and Le, p.792.

16. 16. Speech to
an Abolitionist rally on August 1, 1845 on the First Anniversary of
West Indian Emancipation, reprinted in Emerson's Antislavery Writings, p.36.

22. 22.
"Considerations by the Way" in The Conduct of Life, Es
and Le, p.1082.

23. 23. "Wealth
brings with it its own checks and balances. The basis of political
economy is non-interference. The only safe rule is found in the
self-adjusting meter of demand and supply." "Wealth" in
The Conduct of
Life, Es and Le, p.999.

24.
24."Self-Reliance," Es and
Le, pp.262-63.

25. 25. "Man the
Reformer," Es and
Le, p.149.

26. 26.
March-April, 1843, Emerson in
His Journals, p.304.

27. 27. May 2_?,
1843, Emerson in His
Journals, p.306.

28. 28. Quoted in
Jeffrey Steele, The
Representation of the Self in the American
Renaissance (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1987), p.102.

29. 29. See the
comments on Emerson's 1855 lecture, "Woman," before the Boston
Women's Rights Convention in Christina Zwarg, Feminist Conversations: Fuller, Emerson, and
the Play of Reading (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1995), pp.259-61.

33. 33. Mary
Kupiec Cayton, Emerson's
Emergence: Self and Society in the Transformation of New England,
1800-1845 (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1989).

34. 34. In
Feminist
Conversations, Zwarg argues
that Emerson was much more sympathetic to Fourier's vision of
socialism and Fuller's more fluid, relational conception of the
self.

35. 35.
Nature, in Es
and Le, p.8.

36. . Emerson
emphasizes drill and concentration in the chapter on "Power"
in The Conduct of
Life.

37. 37. I have
discussed these laws of power elsewhere and how they might be applied
to contemporary issues and events. See Intimacy and Spectacle: Liberal Theory as
Political Education (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1994). The argument there is that liberal
theorists have appropriated only one side of Emerson, the
oculocentric individualist, and have ignored his potential as a
democratic theorist of power. Emerson's place within what I call the
liberal tradition of humanistic corporatism is similar in some
respects to the critical interpretation offered by Christopher
Newfield, The Emerson Effect:
Individualism and Submission in America, who uses a related term, "corporate
individualism," to describe the liberal tradition.

38. . Emerson
invokes the law of compensation or polarity in both the essay on
"Politics" in Essays: Second
Series, Es and Le, p.565 and the chapter on "Power" in
The Conduct of
Life, Es and Le, p.977. An indicative phrase in the former,
and repeated slightly altered in the latter, is "Wild liberty
develops iron conscience."

45. 45."You kin
feel a switch in his hand when he's talkin' to yuh." Zora Neale
Hurston, Their Eyes Were
Watching God (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1979), p.78.

46. 46. November,
1848, Emerson in His
Journals, p.399.

47. 47."The
Republican revisionist reading has replaced Lockean liberalism with
civic humanism. Part Aristotle, part Cicero, part Machiavelli, civic
humanism conceives of man as a political being whose realization of
self occurs only through participation in public life, through active
citizenship in a republic. A virtuous man is concerned primarily with
the public good, res
publica, or commonweal, not
with private or selfish ends." Isaac Kramnick, "Republican
Revisionism Revisited," American Historical Review, Vol.87, No.3, June 1982, p.630.

48. 48.Emerson,
"Politics" in Essays: Second
Series, Es and Le, p.563 and "Culture" in The Conduct of Life, Es
and Le, p.1020.

50. 50."Human
life is made up of the two elements, power and form, and the
proportion must be invariably kept if we are to have it sweet and
sound." Emerson, "Experience," Es and Le, p.481.

51. 51.Habitat
for Humanity's homebuilding program is an example of this kind of
proximate help.

52. 52. The
danger of "self-centeredness" for virtue ethics in general is
discussed in David Solomon, "Internal Objections to Virtue Ethics,"
in Midwest Studies in
Philosophy, Vol.XIII,
Ethical Theory: Character and
Virtue, eds. Peter A. French,
Theodore E. Uehling, Jr., and Howard K. Wettstein (Notre Dame:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), pp.428-41.

53. 53.Emerson,
"Napolean; or, the Man of the World" in Representative Men, Es
and Le, p.745.

54. 54. Emerson,
"Self-Reliance," Es and
Le, p.275.

55. 55.Emerson,
"Circles" in Essays: First
Series, Es and Le, p.408.

56. 56.Emerson,
"Illusions" in The Conduct of
Life, Es and Le, p.1116.

57. 57.Emerson,
"History" in Essays: First
Series, Es and Le, p.254.

58. 58. I am
indebted to Charles McCracken for raising this objection. In the
lecture, "Man the Reformer," Emerson shows a clear preference for
agrarian work and hopes that if more people benefited from it, "the
advantages which arise from the division of labor" could be usefully
reclaimed. Es and
Le, p.139. The journal entry
for April 7, 1840 expresses a similar view. "I see with great
pleasure this growing inclination in all persons who aim to speak the
truth, for manual labor & the farm. It is not that commerce, law,
& state employments are unfit for a man, but that these are now
all so perverted and corrupt that no man can right himself in them,
he is lost in them, he cannot move hand or foot in them. Nothing is
left him but to begin the world anew, as he does who puts the spade
into the ground for food. When many shall have done so, when the
majority shall admit the necessity of reform, of health, of sanity in
all these institutions, then the way will be open again to the great
advantages that arise from division of labor. & a man will be
able to select employments fittest for him without losing his
selfdirection & becoming a tool." Emerson in His Journals, p.236.

59. 59. Dewey's
theory of experience is complex. The central insight, for my
purposes, is that experience involves a reciprocal relationship
between energetic doing and receptive undergoing. When the two are
combined with imagination so that they form a bounded whole, Dewey
seems to think experiencing is on the right track, aligned with
Nature. See John Dewey, Art as
Experience (New York:
Perigree Books, 1980) and Experience and Nature (Chicago and Lasalle, IL: Open Court,
1994).

Similarly, in Nature
Emerson believed that while "the axis of vision is not coincident
with the axis of things," this opacity can be overcome so that "the
"miraculous" can be seen "in the common." Es and Le, p.47. Later in "Experience," he was much
less sanguine about achieving such a perfect alignment with
Nature.

60. 60.
Richardson, Emerson: Mind on
Fire, p.345.

61.
61.Emerson's Pragmatic Vision:
The Dance of the Eye
(University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993),
p.81.

62. 62 Reprinted
in Emerson's Antislavery
Writings, p.73, and textual
commentary, p.170. At other times Emerson seemed to be uninterested
in this need for local concreteness. See his earlier address on the
Fugitive Slave Law also reprinted in this volume, p.53 and textual
commentary on p.164., "Address to the Citizens of Concord" on May 3,
1851 that served as a campaign stump speech for John Gorham Palfrey,
a member of Congress on the Free Soil ticket. In this address Emerson
begins with a mild regret that he has been forced into politics by
recent events despite "a duty to shun" such activities. Then, in the
second paragraph he grounds his subsequent remarks. "We do not
breathe well. There is infamy in the air. I have a new experience. I
wake in the morning with a painful sensation, which I carry about all
day, and which, when traced home, is the odious remembrance of that
ignominy which has fallen on Massachusetts, which robs the landscape
of beauty, and takes the sunshine out of every hour."

72. 72.Lasch,
The Revolt of the Elites and
the Betrayal of Democracy,
pp.99, 117-28.

73. 73.It is
important that the historical record on populism be kept straight and
Lasch's theoretical arguments often threaten to understate the
unhappy chapters in this record. See Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion (New York: Pantheon, 1995). However, it is
also important to avoid collapsing Lasch's arguments for localism
with communitarian and republican arguments which, as I have
suggested, do not focus on the need for a political education in
power. For two examples of this kind of overkill, see Stephen Holmes,
The Anatomy of
Antiliberalism (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1993), pp.122-40 and Richard Rorty,
The New Yorker, January 30, 1995, pp.86-90.

74. 74.See, for
example, the mainstreaming and inclusion of handicapped students in
public education in Joel F. Handler, The Conditions of Discretion: Autonomy,
Community, Bureaucracy
(New